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Hard Copy Meant Harder Thinking in Advance

But my personal big takeaway is how much whipping out copy at an unimaginable rate has become the norm.

For whatever reason my handwriting has been miserable scrawl from day one (I struggled with it — both my parents had beautiful penpersonship that I much admired and wanted to emulate). So I have scant experience writing in longhand (some poems seemed to emerge easier with that method, but that’s about it). But any type of physical print forced thought before writing.The tedium and time consumption of writing, editing and re-typing is lost on young’uns today, but it made you concentrate harder on what you wanted to say before committing it to paper. The idea that you would not read your article a final time before it went to press was for, well, sub-professionals. Now it’s hit “send” and fergeddit.

I’m less offend by outright vile deeds like the above incident than I am by the endless streams of copy errors that turn up day after day in every publication, online or, sigh, in print.